The Imaginaries: Little Scraps of Larger Stories

by Emily Winfield Martin

Overview

Best-selling author/illustrator of The Wonderful Things You Will Be, Emily Winfield Martin, shares her "Imaginaries": paintings from over the last ten years, captioned with one enigmatic sentence, designed to inspire.

From mermaids and giant flowers to magical robes and mysterious characters, this full-color collection of old and new art from Emily Winfield Martin will inspire the artist and writer in you! Each glorious image is given a mysterious or magical one-line caption--the beginning of a story, or maybe the middle--you imagine the rest.

The captions are hand-written on vintage scraps of paper, envelopes, postcards and more. Akin to the Chris van Allsburg book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, The Imaginairies is destined to become a cult classic in its own right.

The book is unjacketed with foil and a matte finish on the cover; a treasure to keep and display and pore over for years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780553511048
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	02/04/2020
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
Lexile:	520L (what's this?)
File size:	41 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

#1 New York Times bestseller Emily Winfield Martin is the author and illustrator of Dream Animals, Day Dreamers, The Wonderful Things You Will Be, The Littlest Family's Big Day, Oddfellow's Orphanage, and Snow and Rose. Emily is known to wander in the woods whenever she can. She lives ilives in Portland, Oregon in a little house with a hobbit door and lots of bookshelves. You can find her at emilywinfieldmartin.com.

Editorial Reviews

Martin has truly created something unique and inspiring for storytellers and explorers, young and old.” —School Library Journal, starred review

“Romantic is the vibe…. Whimsical writing prompts in a vintage style for your inner Wes Anderson.” —Kirkus Reviews

"A stirring sheaf of variations on the theme of luxurious eccentricity."  —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2019-10-23
Addressed in an opening note to "the one who finds this," this collection of what Martin calls story scraps invites readers to stretch their creativity.

Martin presents a "misfit" series of narrative fragments, describing them as stories that don't yet exist. Each spread features either a full-bleed or one-page illustration, rendered in delicate gouache and acrylics and accompanied by an intentionally cryptic, hand-lettered note, as if jotted on a scrap of paper. ("She hadn't believed in the night garden.") Most of the illustrations feature elegant portraits, many of tall, slender, doe-eyed, pale girls and women (including a mermaid) in nature. Refreshingly, two of the nonwhite humans have very dark skin instead of the lighter, ambiguous skin color used to signify diversity in so many picture books today. Occasionally, massive and mysterious sea monsters appear; after all, "the sea gives up its secrets slowly." In both artistic style and tone, romantic is the vibe: Martin writes that she found one story fragment "in the roots of an English rose." The tone momentarily shifts toward surreal when she paints a young girl at a birthday party with friends who have human bodies but large animal heads (a cat, a bear, etc.), but the more wistful tone dominates.

Whimsical writing prompts in a vintage style for your inner Wes Anderson. (Picture book. 8-15)

Kirkus Reviews